[time-nuts] beaglebones, time, web services

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Sat Jul 4 20:11:03 EDT 2015


On 7/4/15 12:31 PM, Bob Camp wrote:
> Hi
>
> As silly as it sounds, having a separate board for the user i/o is probably the best way to go.
> You already have an empire of devices that (somehow) chat with each other. The barrier of
> “it’s all on one device” has been broken even before i/o has been added.

Well, sure.. that's what the BBB is for.. mostly the UI.  but at some 
point, the web server has to tell someone else what to do.  You can fire 
off another process, send a message to another processor (or thread), or 
whatever.

And I was looking for a simple(!) webserver that supports this level of 
sophistication.  There's plenty of very lightweight examples out there 
(that run on Arduinos for instance) that are basically single threaded.. 
you intercept the "GET /myfunction" (or whatever) and that turns into a 
"call abc(parameters)"... and while "abc()" is running, the webserver 
isn't.  That's fine for "setting parameters", but not good if the abc 
process is going to take minutes.





> Once you get past that part of it, it’s all a bunch of “that depends” and personal preference. There is very little
> right and wrong. For very little money, you can go from a single core to a quad core device on your i/o
> processor. The same is true of RAM and flash. If this is a one up (or few dozen) sort of thing, optimizing the
> board probably makes less sense than attacking the (inevitable) multitude of Ardunio gear controlling the
> rest of it.
>
> =====
>
> Assuming that we’re not already way off track - I’d use a “real” web server to feed the user. You get the full
> range of modules that way. You can handle anything you decide you need as the feature list expands. I’d back
> it up with Python, just because it seems to work fine and I already have worked my way up the learning curve. Others
> would (I’m sure) recommend languages that they are more familiar with. They all will get you to the same end
> result. If you want to be cool, there’s always Node.js …


Yeah, that's where I'm heading.. but I was looking for something between 
"single threaded webserver with direct calls" and "install apache"




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